Assistive Robotics Laboratory

Research themes: The mission of ARL is to develop agile wearable robots to enhance locomotor abilities across daily activities and further the quality of life for humans. To achieve this goal, we are investigating control and optimization techniques to design and optimize assistive strategies that are invariant across users and tasks and implementing these strategies on self-designed, user-friendly wearable devices for experimental verifications.

Lab facility/equipment: The Assistive Robotics Laboratory (ARL for short) is equipped with essential facilities to conduct experiments for human gait analysis. The lab has an instrumented treadmill (Bertec Incorporation) that can measure the ground reaction forces between human subjects and the belts. These two belts can be controlled independently with different speeds to mimic the case of adding perturbation to human walking. The lab is also equipped with a motion capture system (Vicon Motion Systems Ltd UK) to capture human movement through reflective markers. In addition, the 8-channel electromyography (EMG) sensors (Delsys Incorporation) allow us to capture and analyze muscle activities. The lab has a bilateral, powered hip exoskeleton (Enhanced Robotics, China) that serves as an experimental platform for us to study the performance of different controllers.